Promises on stage

ON Tuesday before the anniversary, on the lawns of the White House, the president of the United States told a story about two firemen. They were big men, he said. Donald Trump is not a small man himself. The building beside them had started to creak and they thought it was coming down on top of them. So they grabbed Trump under the arms, lifted him off the ground and whisked him away. He told them he could run himself. They kept going. The occasion was an event honouring the emergency responders of Sept 11, three days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11. He has told the tale before at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in 2016. What is worth noticing is not the story. It is the direction in which it has been travelling. On the day itself, Trump gave a phone interview to a local station and said he had spoken to someone who saw at least 10 people jump. Two days later, he was near the site, talking to reporters. He had 100 men down there, he said, and another 125 on the way. He was there to spur them on. That is the earliest version. A man who sent workers. By November 2015, at a rally in Colu­m­bus, he had watched people jump himself — from a window in his apartment four miles uptown. You cannot see a person at four miles. By April 2016, in Buffalo, he said he had helped clear the rubble. A little bit, he said. And now — he was being lifted off the ground by firemen who feared for his life. Commemoration in Pakistan is an occasion for announcements. Twenty-five years, and he has moved from the edge of the frame to the middle of it. He has since written on Truth Social that he was not there on the day of the collapse but shortly afterwards. The correction never travels as far as the story. Notice where these versions were delivered. Columbus, a rally. Birmingham, a rally, where he also said thousands had cheered in Jersey City as the towers fell, which the police there had already denied. Buffalo, a rally. New Hampshire, a campaign stop. The White House lawn last week. The story grows in front of audiences. On Friday, he was at the Pentagon. He had wanted to be in New York then changed the plan once it was clear he would not be allowed to speak. The ceremony there has barred politicians from speaking since 2012. It is hours of families reading names aloud. There is nothing to announce, and it offers a president nothing. Our societies are built the other way around. Every commemoration we have has a dais, a chief guest and a running order. The families are seated. Someone speaks. This is not a failure of etiquette. It is the design. A Pakistani commemoration is not an occasion for remembering. It is an occasion for announcing. And what gets announced is a promise. Compensation. An inquiry. A committee. A resolve that this will never happen again. The promise is the reason the stage is there, because a promise is a thing only the powerful can make, and it has to be made in front of the people it is being made to. Look at what the promises have produced. In December 2014, gunmen walked into the Army Public School in Peshawar and killed 132 children. In my lifetime, I thought it was the closest this country has come to a moment when everything might have stopped. I remember thinking, this is it. There is no argument left. Someone will have to fix the thing itself now. What the country produced was a plan. Twenty points. Military courts. A National Action Plan, which is an honest name, because the action was the plan. Here is the part I keep returning to. It did not quietly expire. In June 2024, the multi-domain Azm-i-Istehkam campaign was laun­ch­­ed, and the National Ac­­tion Plan was there to justify it. What was anno­un­ced beside the coffins of children in 2014 was still working in 2024. Catastrophe here does not produce repair. It produces structure. The school is not made safe. A framework is built. The framework outlasts the grief that authorised it, and it can be pointed later at whatever needs pointing at. Now we are discussing new provinces. The conversation has arrived, as these conversations do, after something didn't quite work out the way we thought and it is being offered as an answer to it. Redraw the map. Change the units. New assemblies, new seats, a new tier of government. I am not going to argue here about whether new provinces are a good idea. Ask the smaller question. In 10 years, when something terrible happens again and the stage goes up and someone stands at it, what will they be holding? What did these debates leave behind, and who will it be used against? We keep waiting for the incident that finally ends the argument. It does not come. There is no version of this where the grief is large enough. The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi. X: @LedeingLady Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2026